


How the Light Gets In

by slightlykylie



Category: The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 14:57:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightlykylie/pseuds/slightlykylie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bipolar in the wake of the superflu.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the Light Gets In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anne/gifts).



               Day nine of the flu, or so Holly thought, and she rifled her medicine cabinet for the hundredth time, scattering pill bottles and Q-tips and toothpaste and ancient tubes of aloe and calamine lotion.  A couple of the pill bottles fell off the shelves and bounced into the sink, and she reached for them hastily, lined them up on the counter, reached for the rest and knocked half the stuff in the cabinet into the sink that time.  She snatched the bottles out of the mess, the familiar orange bottles with the white tops, and then finished the medication lineup, craning her head to read the bottles: valproate, lamotrigine, diazepam, quetiapine, fluoxetine.  Plenty of meds, and plenty of meds was supposed to mean plenty of sanity, and nothing about this world she was living in right now was sane.  But then again, they might have quit working, you heard about that all the time, "Prozac poopout" and mood stabilizers that stopped doing anything except fucking up your kidneys and benzos that got you addicted and left you wide awake at 3 am all the same.  That must be it.  Sure.  Either she was crazy or everyone else in the world was dead, and which one of those was the most likely?  Occam's Razor.  Simple probability.  She had bipolar disorder and her meds had stopped working and she'd gone off the rails. A hospital stay, that was what she needed, a nice weeklong stay in a locked ward and a team of psychiatrists and psychologists and group therapists and occupational therapists and, and, and fucking aides who let you sign out DVDs for three hours at a time and restocked the paint and the little wooden boxes at the arts and crafts table.  A few days of new meds and talk therapy and painting little wooden boxes and she'd be good.  Back to herself, or back to the sane version of herself, anyway.  And she'd tell everyone about the horrible psychotic episode she'd had, the one where everyone was dead and the streets stank like rotten forgotten meat and when the looters came she'd had to hide under the bed that her dead girlfriend was lying on.  Horrible psychotic episode.  They'd pat her hand and tell her she was brave and set her up for a day program until everyone was A-OK.  Yeah, a hospital would do it, a hospital was where she needed to be.  Only when she'd shown up at the hospital the ER was glutted with dead and dying bodies, the ER and the halls and the waiting rooms too and even the floor of the lobby, and when she'd managed to catch a nurse by the arm as she passed and told her she was bipolar and having a psychotic episode the nurse had let out a spiraling hooting laugh and told her so was everyone else and then coughed up a wad of green phlegm that splatted on the floor between them.  So Holly had gone home and taken a triple dose of antipsychotics and fallen asleep on the couch, hoping things would be better in the morning.  But they weren't.  And they weren't now.  Her screwed-up brain was still telling her everyone was dead.  In the morning Bailey was still dead in their bed and the streets were still empty and there were still five bodies hanging from the lampposts down the street with signs that said LOOTER hung around each of their necks and everything was still full of the stench of rotten meat.  So Holly was still crazy.  Had to be.  She was crazy, that was all.

               And she knew on some level, some deep-down level that even the bipolar couldn't touch, that that wasn't it.  Psychosis wasn't like this.  Psychosis, at least for Holly, was hearing voices or seeing things move in the shadows that weren't there and looking at ordinary objects and seeing faces in them.  Psychosis was fuzzy-edged and oversaturated, and she was lucky enough to be a crazy person who always had a small, half-formed awareness of whether she was sane or insane at the moment.  And right now, she knew that she was sane, or sane enough.  But she couldn't believe it.  She wouldn't believe it.  How could everyone in the world be dead?  So she was crazy.

 

***

               She wasn't crazy.  

               Not at the moment, anyhow.  She'd been a little wired after the superflu hit, for sure – a mixed episode, that was what they called it, mania and panic combined. In the past she'd been kicked into mixed state by job stress, so she supposed it wouldn’t have been reasonable to expect to get through the death of the world in her right mind. And so she'd lost it a little.  But she hadn't been hallucinating and she hadn't been delusional.  Everyone really was dead.  She could see that now.  She could even face it, calmly and sanely.  As long as she  stayed on a triple-plus dose of her meds, she could.  Get yourself wrapped around eleven hundred milligrams of Seroquel and eight milligrams of Valium and you could face anything.

               She supposed she ought to figure out what to do next.  Where should she go?  She couldn't stay here in Springfield.  Everyone was dead in Springfield.  But if she was immune, Holly thought (and there was a distinct chance she wasn't, a chance the virus was simply incubating quietly, biding its time), she couldn't be the only immune person in the world.  It didn't make sense.  She didn't have the faintest idea what might have gotten her through this, but whatever it was, she couldn't be the only person who had it.  She wasn't that special.

               Maybe it was her med cocktail that had done it, she thought.   Maybe the only people left were the crazies.  People on heavy antipsychotics, maybe.  People on major mood stabilizers.   A world of schizophrenics and manic-depressives, with a few atypical unipolar depressives tossed in for flavoring.  She felt the faintest of smiles cross her face at the thought.  What a jolly old world that would be.

               But, thinking logically, that didn't really wash either.  She wasn't the only manic-depressive person in town.  Or she hadn't been, before.  Now she supposed that she was.

               Which brought her back to the question: what was she going to do now?

               Well, take a hike and get the hell out of town.  Get out in the country somewhere, maybe. Someplace away from the smell and the creaking of ropes as hanged bodies blew back and forth with the breeze. Away from Bailey's body, slowly turning to a slushy pile of discolored flesh and bare bone in their marriage bed. Triple meds or no, Holly's calm threatened to break like a dam whenever her thoughts stumbled over Bailey's body.

               So she needed to go.  Make her way toward one of the bigger cities, maybe Jackson or Barstow, and then skirt the perimeter -- close enough that she might run across some other refugees making their way out but not close enough to catch the smell of death on the breeze.  Time to do it.  Pack up and go.

               And she would. Once she'd gotten one or two more Valium in her system.  Once she'd done that, she would go.

 

*******

               One or two more Valium in her system, then a couple-three more, and by the time she met up with some people, she was a hair's-breadth away from death.

               She'd made it fifteen or twenty miles out of town before the depression hit and slammed her into the ground.  Call it depression or call it the aftermath of the death of the world – it worked out to the same thing.  Whatever it was, it was beyond the help of heavy-duty antipsychotics and it was sure as hell beyond the help of Prozac.  It knocked her flat and pinned her there, the deadweight of the world sprawled across her chest.  And she fell down in the shade of an empty barn, weeping and clutching her knees as she rolled herself up like a potato bug, sweat welding her clothes to the contours of her body, and she let her mind empty and then watched the little white pills fill it up, crowding to the edges of her mind's eye.

               She'd raided every pharmacy in Springfield before she left town, shuffling through endless shelves of Viagra and vaginal-itch cream to try to find her meds.  Most of the pharmacies had been hit by looters, and while the looters didn't seem much interested in mood stabilizers or antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds had clearly been more popular.    Three of the first five CVSes she'd broken into were out of Valium, out of Ativan, out of Xanax and Dalmane and Klonopin.  Even most of the over-the-counter sleep meds were gone, emptied out by people who thought Benadryl was going to cure the superflu. Still, she'd managed to pull together maybe three months' worth of benzos and a hefty pile of boxes of diphenhydramine.  Three months' worth should have been plenty, of course.  She could walk halfway across the country in three months, picking up pills as she went.  But she kept going, searching for smaller pharmacies, the ones no one would have bothered to hit.  By the time she was ready to leave town she had a year's worth of antianxiety meds at her old dosage.   Even if she tripled it, she'd have enough to go for awhile.  She was just making sure.

               So she held herself together in the shade of the barn and let the tears slash through her like glass shards through cheap cloth, her body aching for Bailey's touch, the light caress of her hand as she smoothed the tears from Holly's face, the feel of her firm embrace anchoring Holly to the world of the living. She cried and writhed and then she thought of the pills, and  the thought felt like salvation.

               An overdose of benzodiazepines will kill you by stopping your breathing.  Even before the flu Holly had been in the habit of hitting the Valium hard when things weren't working, taking three or four pills instead of one, and the doctors had told her over and over that she was courting death when she did that.  This time she took forty-seven, counting them out one by one until she got tired.  She lay back down in the shade, keeping the open bottle near to hand in case she decided she needed any more.  The Valium stole softly into her brain, wrapping everything in a kind layer of cotton that tightened gently and gradually as she drifted off into unconsciousness.  Maybe there was a heaven and she'd see Bailey; maybe there wasn't and she'd be lost in whatever darkness had taken the rest of them.  Either way, it was a better deal than what fate was trying to put on her.

               And it was ridiculous, someone finding her like that.  The first people she'd encountered since the plague, and that was how they found her.  It couldn't have been much longer than thirty minutes after she'd taken the pills that they found her, or she'd have been able to finish dying decently.  Maybe they'd been following her, hanging back because she was identifiably crazy; maybe that was how they'd found her so quickly. But however they did it, they found her passed out with the pill bottle in her hand -- one man and two women and a little girl, and one of the women had taken a CPR course at the Y once.   One fucking CPR course, and she managed to drag Holly back into the world.  Holly's breathing had been faint but it hadn't stopped yet; half the pills were dissolved, but a stick down her throat made the rest of them come right back up.  It was a horrible, humiliating way to come back, and it was infuriating to find out that all her choices were gone.  These people were not going to let her die.  They were lonely and they were selfish and they were insisting on keeping Holly for themselves.  They'd taken her prisoner and they were sentencing her to life. 

 

*******

               The woman who knew CPR turned out to be Emily Thornton, and Holly probably hated her the most.  The other woman was Hannah Blackwell and the man was Theo Goran and what did any of that matter, anyway?  They were kidnappers and she was their hostage and so what possible use could she have for their names?   They set up camp right in the shadow of that barn, trying to tend to her; they asked her what all the pills in her bag were for, but she didn't answer, and so they assumed they were just-in-case pills meant for more suicide attempts and they didn't give her any.  Within a day she'd slipped gratefully into catatonia, mind perfectly empty and blank, her body lax and still.  The tiny bit of her that was left, that was still able to make out sounds when they talked to her and feel the food dribbling down her face when they tried to feed her, was sulkily glad about that.   Sooner or later these people were going to figure out that it took a lot more than CPR to keep a person alive, and then maybe they'd leave her alone and let her die in peace.

               But the kid, though.  Amy.  No matter how Holly tried, she couldn't hate the kid, let alone blame her for any of this.  From a logical standpoint, of course, you couldn't blame a five-year-old for much of anything, but she also felt a queer kinship with the girl; Holly, after all, had been reduced to a child herself by these people, was being fed and dressed and managed the same as Amy was.          

               And the problem was, the kid seemed to like her too.  More than that – she seemed to need her.  Holly had never had or wanted kids, even if she and Bailey could have afforded to throw a couple thousand dollars at a sperm bank.  Kids had always seemed like little factories for shit and snot and shrieks, nothing more.  And for the most part, they seemed to catch her dislike and they hated her right back.  No matter.

               So she didn't know what it was about this kid.  Maybe Holly looked like Amy's mother.  Maybe she liked soft flesh better than hard bones and protruding tendons (thanks to the antipsychotics, Holly had a nice Mrs. Claus kind of body; Emily and Hannah looked like marathon runners, both of them). Whatever it was, the tiny still-functional part of Holly's mind couldn't miss it when Amy, her hand tiny and sticky and sweaty, grabbed Holly's left hand after dinner and held it for hours, her grasp tentative at first and then stronger, tighter.  She couldn't miss how Amy fell asleep still holding Holly's hand, her body curved to match the shape of Holly's but not quite close enough to cuddle up against her.  The small part of her that was still alive and aware could see the fear and the sadness and the longing in Amy's eyes when she looked at Holly.  For whatever reason, Holly was someone that Amy didn't want to lose.  And Holly, who hated kids, who didn't give a shit about the world and who had been looking for the quickest way out of it, somehow felt she didn't quite have the heart to cause Amy one more loss.

 

*****

               After four days, four days in which Holly slid further and further into catatonia, the people who'd found her were considering leaving her.  Three days ago Holly would have been delighted.  Now she wasn't so sure.

               She could still make out a little bit of what was happening around her, a few words that pushed at the edges of the white blank that was most of her mind now.  _– leave her here_ , she got, with a vague awareness that it was the man speaking.  Then a woman's voice: _can't – why did we – die if we leave_.  The other woman: _\-- die anyway – what if – can't walk._  The first woman: -- _rush – someplace to be?_  And then the second woman again: _\-- think we – yes.  Dreams – old woman – Nebraska -- know?_

Then, all of a sudden, there was screaming. The little girl.  Amy. 'No, no, no!" she cried, sobbing and choking, and the sound shattered the blank of Holly's mind.  "I want her, don't leave her, I want her –"  Her voice was devolving into incoherence, but Holly could make out enough to hear "Mommy, Mommy, I want my Mommy…"  And then she collapsed, wordless and wracked with sobs, and crawled close to Holly.  And Holly knew that she must have been right, that she must look something like the girl's mother, and she also knew that only the tiniest part of this was actually about Holly.  It was about Amy's real mother, the mother the girl must have seen die choking on green phlegm with her face swollen and black, the mother who'd given her the only security she knew in the world.  She wanted her mother.  She wanted the world to be normal again, she wanted everyone to be alive again, and she wanted her mommy.  Instead, she was stuck with three strangers, none of whom loved her, and a frozen wordless woman who looked or felt a little bit like her mother.

               Still sobbing, Amy slipped her hand, tear-wet from wiping her face, into Holly's hand.

               And for the first time, Holly squeezed the little girl's hand back.

 

***

               The world came back slowly.

               It took her a week for Holly to remember how to speak again.  But she slipped her arms around Amy when Amy crawled near, and eventually she figured out how to stroke the little girl's hair and hold her tight when she cried.  Meanwhile, Amy kept trying to get Holly to come back.  "Here, you have to eat soup, you must be so hungry," she'd say, or "Will you take me into that house to pee?  You never walk, you must have pins and needles in your feet."  It was slow going, but eventually Holly managed to point to the pills in the bag.  Emily was skeptical, but she let Holly take out her regular dose of medication –she kept forgetting what she was doing and it took her an hour for her to find the right pills, but she got there in the end.  A few more days and she could find a word here and there, could shape her mouth around the words and force them out if she tried. When she spoke, Amy's smile was like a summer breeze.  And the day that she managed to play a game of tag with Amy, the party decided to move on.

               Holly didn't understand it, didn't understand why they were pushing to go when there was plenty to live on here.  But then, she'd never had the dreams.  The pills took care of that.  Some nights when she was still catatonic she'd felt something ranging around the edges of her non-consciousness – something that caused peace, something else that caused terror – but she always shrank away from those feelings, and her death-calm remained untouched.   And now that she was back on the sleep meds, there was nothing at all.  She didn't much like the idea of leaving, but she was beginning to feel that she disliked the idea of being alone even less.

***

               Four months later, in Boulder, it was better, but it wasn't over.  It would never really be over.

               Holly moved into a small, pretty house with Amy.  Most of the other kids in Boulder seemed to have multiple "mommies," but Amy stuck to Holly.  On the two-month trip across the country, Holly had learned that while Emily and Hannah were nice enough people, they were not at all maternal.  For her own part, Holly had never really learned why Amy was so drawn to her, but she wasn't going to question it.  Amy was the person in this world who kept Holly from being alone.  If she lost that, she might as well have stayed catatonic for the rest of a very short life.

               Holly took her pills and she was doing all right for now, but she never managed to forget that those pills were going to expire in a few months, and she had no idea what she was going to do then.  For awhile she'd make it through, taking higher and higher doses to compensate for the expiration, driving farther and farther to pharmacies she hadn't hit yet, but one day she was going to run out of pharmacies or the pills were going to stop working entirely or both.  And what was she going to do then?  Somehow she doubted that a chemist or whoever it was that made her meds was going to wind up in Boulder, making her meds solo.  She perused library books on homeopathic mood-stabilizing meds, but she doubted that St. John's wort and valerian were going to cover it, even if she did manage to find a way to grow them.  One of the books recommended chamomile tea.  Chamomile tea for severe bipolar disorder.  Yeah, that was going to work.

               But for now, things were okay.  A doctor or two had to find the Free Zone soon, maybe even a psychiatrist or a therapist; maybe they'd have some ideas.  Maybe the herbal remedies really would take the edge off, help her to get through.  She started looking at books on cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy, picked up a light box to straighten out her sleep schedule as best she could once they got the damn power on again, started keeping a mood diary to check in on herself and do the best she could.  It was, after all, all she could do.

               Amy was still having nightmares about "the shadow man," and every night that it happened she'd crawl into Holly's bed.  Holly would pull her close, feel the trusting curve of Amy's body against her own, and think, _I have to keep it together for her sake.  I have to be okay._

               Well, for the moment she was.  Maybe someday she wouldn't be.  But there wasn't much she could do about it now.  So she'd take her meds, hold Amy, be the best she could be for that little girl.  If something happened that was out of her control she'd figure it out as she went.  Right now was all she had.  And right now she was out the superflu, out of the mania, out of the suicidality, out of the catatonia. Out of the place where there was no reason at all to keep on breathing.  And right now, Amy's bad dreams disappeared when Holly held her and they'd both found someone to love, and sure, love was never going to cure manic-depression, but it was going to make life worth something until the bad times descended once more. Right now, that was all that mattered. 


End file.
